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February 04, 2016

TGIFF - Introducing Denim Days!

It's time for Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday! If this is your first time here at Devoted Quilter, welcome! I can't wait to see what you've finished this week :)

I'm a bit of a packrat, and I've had a closet full of old jeans for years. I didn't know what I was going to use them for, but I certainly wasn't about to throw them out - all that denim is like free fabric, after all! To be honest, part of why I wasn't using the jeans was the simple fact that I didn't want to deconstruct them into usable pieces. I made a denim quilt for my brother back in 2000 and taking all those jeans apart was a real pain in the behind hand. Cutting denim with scissors is hard work!

Then, sometime before Christmas, Natalia Bonner of Piece N Quilt, posted a picture on Instagram of a denim quilt she made years ago, and she said the denim for it was all torn. I checked out the tutorial on her blog and was excited to see that she deconstructed all the jeans for her quilt by tearing them, just like fabric stores used to tear the fabric you bought. I got out a pair of my old jeans and gave it a try and it worked! Not only that, but ripping denim is strangely therapeutic :)

I was in between projects in early January and waiting for fabric to come in the mail, so I started playing with some of that denim I've been hoarding. The result is a whole series of projects, which I'll be sharing every Friday in February. I'm calling it Denim Days.

Each Friday this month I'll share a project or two. Some will be my own designs and I'll include tutorials, while others will be projects I've made using someone else's tutorial. All of them will help you use up any old jeans you have lying around. If you don't have old jeans lying around, thrift stores are a great source, or ask friends (especially friends who have kids) to donate their old jeans to a good cause -your awesome sewing projects!

Vanessa uses quilting cotton for both sides of her headband, but I was already in "What else can I make out of denim?" mode when I decided to make mine, so I decided to try using denim for one side. The tutorial recommends Shape Flex, which I didn't have, but I did have some fusible interfacing lying around, so I used that on the quilting cotton. I didn't bother to use any on the denim side because I figured it would be stiff enough without it, and I was right. It's perfect! Using the denim did make it a little harder to turn the headband right side out, but it was still doable. The whole project only took about 20 minutes, including making the template, and now when my hair is getting on my nerves, I can get it out of my face. Yippee! As a bonus, denim goes with pretty much everything.

When I was making the Travel Tic Tac Toe Games that I gave as Christmas gifts, I was already thinking that it would be fun to make a couple using denim for the 9 patch block for the game board, so these were the first things I made after tearing apart some of those old jeans. I really love how they turned out!

Instead of stitching in the ditch around the 9 patch block, I used red thread and a tight zig zag stitch to really emphasize the divisions between the squares. Other than that, I followed the instructions in my tutorial completely.

I hope you'll come back every Friday this month to see what else I'll be sharing for Denim Days! I'm really excited about the projects :) Also, my Just the Basics mystery quilt-a-long will begin in March, so be sure to follow me if you're interested in that! You can find the links for following by Bloglovin, email, Feedly and Instagram in my sidebar.

Now it's your turn! Link up to show off your finishes, then go visit a few of the other links and don't forget to leave comments. It's only a party if we interact with each other, right?

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Hi! I'm Leanne, a Christian passionate about quilts. Pour yourself a cup of something good and join me as I share my quilts and my faith.

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